I Was Amelia Earhart
- Book Review,
by Jane Mendelsohn
Amazon.com
In an evocative and imaginative novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one windy day in 1937.
From Publishers Weekly
Past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix-both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39-that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch. "The sky is flesh," begins the first of the scores of discrete vignettes and reflections that make up the narrative, an apt start to a story drenched in sensuality and the pursuit of it. The Earhart limned here is materialistic, glory-seeking, sexually hungry, outrageously self-absorbed and utterly charismatic. Telling her tale with ruthless honesty in both her own voice and that of the self she sees "from far away... ghostly, aerial," she speaks of her days as America's sweetheart, as the wife of publisher G.P. Putnam. Diverting from the historical record, she also speaks of the years after she and her navigator, Frederick J. Noonan, "a drunk," crash-land on a South Sea island that they name "Heaven, as a kind of joke," but that becomes a decent approximation as the years slip by and the castaways discover happiness in nature and in each other's arms. When rescue seems eminent, Earhart and Noonan take to the air one last time, and crash one last time, perhaps into eternity but in any case into an existence defined by not by control but by "abandonment"-a message in keeping with the story's theme but in fact an ironic one for a novel as calculatedly lovely and moving as this one. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA?This short fictional account seeks to answer the question, "What happened to Amelia Earhart?" Shifting between a first- and third-person narrative, the well-crafted tale draws readers into the personalities of both the aviatrix and her navigator, Fred Noonan, both of whom disappeared on a round-the-world record-making flight in 1937 somewhere near New Guinea. Mendelsohn imagines what might have happened if the plane had landed on an island rather than disappearing into the ocean. Using only a few authentic words credited to the pilot, the author creates a novel that might have been written in Earhart's log for future generations to discover. A flashback reveals the woman's earlier life and the events leading up to the tragic leg of the final flight. The love-hate relationship between Earhart and her husband and manager, G.P. Putnam, is sufficiently sketched to help explain why she was flying in such poor weather with a useless radio and a drunken navigator as her only guide. Survival on the island they name "Heaven" is Earhart and Noonan's single goal. There is the need for food, shelter, water, and finally companionship. Day after day moves on, altering both the characters themselves and forcing them to face their fate together. This is a fast-paced survival story, a tale of relationships, and a mythical account of what might have been. Altogether a great read.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VACopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This first novel treats an enduring modern mystery: what happened to Amelia Earhart, the celebrity aviator who vanished in 1937 while piloting her Lockheed Electra around the world? Amelia reveals her fate in a memoir written in her pilot's log after an emergency landing on a remote Pacific island. At first hopeful of rescue, Amelia and navigator Fred Noonan gradually realize that their old lives are gone. As they use the island's limited resources to create sustenance and shelter, their former animosities wear away, and in time they find a kind of love together. Amelia's fictional voice is dreamlike yet convincing, moving between first and third person, in and out of memories, always mourning the loss of the sky. The book's stylized narration may not engage every historical fiction fan, but readers of aviation history or speculative fiction will find much to interest them here.?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
New York Times Book Review
...you can't help admiring the boldness of a first novelist who would make fiction of a legend.
From AudioFile
With the intriguing premise that Amelia Earhart tells us what happened on her ill-fated flight, Mendelsohn has captured a broad audience with this surprise bestseller. Blair Brown is a great choice to recount Earhart's reminiscences and tell her tale. Brown's soft, steady voice is best with a first-person narrative. She quietly and compellingly tells listeners details of Earhart's life and draws a portrait, not only with words, but also with vocal coloration. Brown leads listeners into Earhart's life and entices us to be her confidant. A smooth and enticing peformance. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
The unsolved mystery of what exactly happened to Earhart, the world's most famous woman pilot, and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, after they disappeared somewhere near New Guinea during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937 has occupied the minds of many. Mendelsohn's fascination with their fate inspired this elegant and sensuously beautiful novel, her first. Most of the book is written from Earhart's point of view, although Mendelsohn slips into third person now and then to provide a sort of aerial view of her heroine, a technique that enhances the otherworldliness of this seductive tropical idyll. She imagines Earhart and Noonan landing safely on a tiny, isolated island, and living a heavenly life far from the nonsense of civilization. This may be no more than a dream dreamt in the face of death as Earhart's beloved Lockheed Electra fell from the sky, but either way presents a psychologically rich portrait of a highly unusual woman. At one point Earhart muses on how she and Noonan have experienced "perpetual revelations." Mendelsohn's readers may feel the same. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
First-novelist Mendelsohn gives us Amelia Earhart's fictive autobiography, written as a message in a bottle from the desert island on which she spent her last days. We're kept pretty close to the facts here for most of the story: Earhart's flying, her marriage to New York publisher G.P. Putnam, her ambiguous sexuality, and her celebrity as a public figure are all components of this putative memoir, which proceeds as a straightforward recollection of the past. The central narrative event is the planning and execution of Earhart's final around-the-world flight, presented here mostly as a publicity stunt gone awry. ``After I flew across the Atlantic and became famous, G.P. decided to mold me into a star.'' And how: Once Putnam became Earhart's husband and manager, every aspect of her career was choreographed for maximum public exposure. Flight logs were written for publication, press conferences and radio communications were recorded for the archives, and itineraries were chosen with a view toward public titillation. On a crucial leg of the final flight in 1937, however, Putnam's skill as a showman becomes Earhart's undoing when the tiny Pacific island where she was meant to make a daring stopover can't be located, forcing her to ditch on an even smaller desert atoll where she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are out of radio range and cut off from the rest of the world. The later, Robinson Crusoe-like portions of Earhart's account are written under the heavy weight of her solitude, and the inevitable affair with Noonan does little to relieve the intensity of the fear and nostalgia that color the account toward the close. The melancholy tone of the opening is completed splendidly in the flat stoicism of the end. Strange, slight, but wonderful: a modest portrait that manages to create some moments of exceptional intensity and power of feeling. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.
There is her love affair with flying ("The sky is flesh") . . . .
There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ("Heroines did what they wanted") . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.
There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ("Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it").
And there is, miraculously, an island ("We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke").
And, most important, there is Noonan . . .
From the Publisher
"Strange, slight, but wonderful: a modest portrait that manages to create some moments of exceptional intensity and power of feeling."
-- Kirkus Reviews"Not to be missed. It is an immediately addicting book, as telegraphic as those of Margaret Duras, and as charged with longing."
-- Liesl Schillinger, Bazaar"Past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix -- both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39 -- that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch."
-- Publishers Weekly
From the Inside Flap
In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.
There is her love affair with flying ("The sky is flesh") . . . .
There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ("Heroines did what they wanted") . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.
There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ("Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it").
And there is, miraculously, an island ("We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke").
And, most important, there is Noonan . . .
From the Back Cover
"Strange, slight, but wonderful: a modest portrait that manages to create some moments of exceptional intensity and power of feeling."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Not to be missed. It is an immediately addicting book, as telegraphic as those of Margaret Duras, and as charged with longing."
-- Liesl Schillinger, Bazaar
"Past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix -- both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39 -- that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch."
-- Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Jane Mendelsohn was born in New York City, July 4, 1965. She was graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University in 1987, and attended Yale Law School for one year before beginning a career as a writer/journalist.
In 1992, Ms. Mendelsohn spotted an article in The New York Times about the discovery of a piece of a plane believed to have been Amelia Earhart's. The article mentioned that Earhart traveled with a navigator, Fred Noonan, who was with her on her last flight. Intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of two people flying around the world together, crashing, and perhaps surviving, she began researching Earhart's life and disappearance. Shortly after, Ms. Mendelsohn began sketching out a book based on her findings. The first version was a much longer book, told entirely in the third person. "Once I finished it," Ms. Mendelsohn says, "I realized that I had only just figured out the story. Now that I knew what had happened, I had to tell it in Earhart's, and my, voice." The result is I Was Amelia Earhart.
Harper's Bazaar hails I Was Amelia Earhart as "an immediately addicting book, as telegraphic as those of Margaret Duras, and as charged with longing....not to be missed." The New York Times writes, "Ms. Mendelsohn has chosen to use the bare-boned outlines of the aviator's life as an armature for a poetic meditation on freedom and love and flight. I Was Amelia Earhart, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's General in His Labyrinth, invokes the spirit of a mythic personage, while standing on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction." I Was Amelia Earhart is Ms. Mendelsohn's first book and novel.
Ms. Mendelsohn's reviews have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Village Voice, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and Yale Review. She has worked as an assistant to the literary editor at The Village Voice and as a tutor at Yale University. At the moment, Ms. Mendelsohn is writing a horror film. She is also sketching out details for her next novel.
Ms. Mendelsohn is married and lives in New York with her husband, filmmaker Nick Davis.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I WAS AMELIA EARHART
The sky is flesh.
The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.
More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've live since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.
I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live an entire life. I was still very young.
So, the sky.
It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I'm flying around the world, there's nothing but sky. The sky is flesh. It's the last sky.
I remember: I'm flying around the world, I'm flying over the Pacific somewhere of the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I'm lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions -- a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand -- and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I'm hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.
This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It's also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.
Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream. In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
